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67-404: Although each culture has its own mythologies and rituals, animism is said to describe the most common, foundational thread of indigenous peoples' "spiritual" or "supernatural" perspectives. The animistic perspective is so widely held and inherent to most indigenous peoples that they often do not even have a word in their languages that corresponds to "animism" (or even "religion"). The term "animism"

134-480: A Hindu text , has a Sanskrit language shloka (hymn), which explains the importance of reverence of ecology. It states: "A pond equals ten wells , a reservoir equals ten ponds, while a son equals ten reservoirs, and a tree equals ten sons." Indian religions worship trees such as the Bodhi Tree and numerous superlative banyan trees , conserve the sacred groves of India , revere the rivers as sacred , and worship

201-405: A 'native' of the culture. Etic knowledge refers to generalizations about human behavior that are considered universally true, and commonly links cultural practices to factors of interest to the researcher, such as economic or ecological conditions, that cultural insiders may not consider very relevant (Morris et al., 1999). Emic and etic approaches of understanding behavior and personality fall under

268-469: A Swiss psychoanalyst , is a researcher who took an emic approach in his studies. Jung studied mythology , religion , ancient rituals, and dreams , leading him to believe that there are archetypes that can be identified and used to categorize people's behaviors. Archetypes are universal structures of the collective unconscious that refer to the inherent way people are predisposed to perceive and process information. The main archetypes that Jung studied were

335-482: A belief that natural objects other than humans have souls. This formulation was little different from that proposed by Auguste Comte as " fetishism ", but the terms now have distinct meanings. For Tylor, animism represented the earliest form of religion, being situated within an evolutionary framework of religion that has developed in stages and which will ultimately lead to humanity rejecting religion altogether in favor of scientific rationality. Thus, for Tylor, animism

402-417: A controversy regarding the ethical claims animism may or may not make: whether animism ignores questions of ethics altogether; or, by endowing various non-human elements of nature with spirituality or personhood, it in fact promotes a complex ecological ethics . Animism is not the same as pantheism , although the two are sometimes confused. Moreover, some religions are both pantheistic and animistic. One of

469-527: A fast, tie threads around a banyan tree, and pray for the well-being of their husbands. Thimmamma Marrimanu , sacred to Indian religions, has branches spread over five acres and was listed as the world's largest banyan tree in the Guinness World Records in 1989. In Hinduism, the leaf of the banyan tree is said to be the resting place for the god Krishna . In the Bhagavat Gita , Krishna said, "There

536-408: A life force to abstract concepts such as words, true names , or metaphors in mythology . Some members of the non-tribal world also consider themselves animists, such as author Daniel Quinn , sculptor Lawson Oyekan , and many contemporary Pagans . English anthropologist Sir Edward Tylor initially wanted to describe the phenomenon as spiritualism, but he realized that it would cause confusion with

603-497: A means of being constantly on guard against potential threats. His suggested explanation, however, did not deal with the question of why such a belief became central to the religion. In 2000, Guthrie suggested that the "most widespread" concept of animism was that it was the "attribution of spirits to natural phenomena such as stones and trees." Many anthropologists ceased using the term animism , deeming it to be too close to early anthropological theory and religious polemic . However,

670-401: A methodological solution. Emic and etic are derived from the linguistic terms phonemic and phonetic , respectively, where a phone is a distinct speech sound or gesture, regardless of whether the exact sound is critical to the meanings of words, whereas a phoneme is a speech sound in a given language that, if swapped with another phoneme, could change one word to another. The possibility of

737-420: A person". Hallowell's approach to the understanding of Ojibwe personhood differed strongly from prior anthropological concepts of animism. He emphasized the need to challenge the modernist, Western perspectives of what a person is, by entering into a dialogue with different worldwide views. Hallowell's approach influenced the work of anthropologist Nurit Bird-David , who produced a scholarly article reassessing

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804-533: A precondition of religion now, in all its variants." Tylor's definition of animism was part of a growing international debate on the nature of " primitive society " by lawyers, theologians, and philologists. The debate defined the field of research of a new science: anthropology . By the end of the 19th century, an orthodoxy on "primitive society" had emerged, but few anthropologists still would accept that definition. The "19th-century armchair anthropologists" argued that "primitive society" (an evolutionary category)

871-449: A rule, approach their environment as an external world of nature that has to be 'grasped' intellectually ... indeed the separation of mind and nature has no place in their thought and practice. Rane Willerslev extends the argument by noting that animists reject this Cartesian dualism and that the animist self identifies with the world, "feeling at once within and apart from it so that the two glide ceaselessly in and out of each other in

938-474: A sealed circuit". The animist hunter is thus aware of himself as a human hunter, but, through mimicry, is able to assume the viewpoint, senses, and sensibilities of his prey, to be one with it. Shamanism , in this view, is an everyday attempt to influence spirits of ancestors and animals, by mirroring their behaviors, as the hunter does its prey. Cultural ecologist and philosopher David Abram proposed an ethical and ecological understanding of animism, grounded in

1005-567: A study was conducted in South Africa using the F-Scale, ( Pettigrew and Friedman) results did not predict any prejudices towards black individuals. This study used emic approaches of study by conducting interviews with the locals and etic approaches by giving participants generalized personality tests. Other explorations of the differences between reality and humans' models of it: Timothy Insoll Too Many Requests If you report this error to

1072-466: A truly objective description was discounted by Pike himself in his original work; he proposed the emic-etic dichotomy in anthropology as a way around philosophic issues about the very nature of objectivity . The terms were also championed by anthropologists Ward Goodenough and Marvin Harris with slightly different connotations from those used by Pike. Goodenough was primarily interested in understanding

1139-614: Is a banyan tree which has its roots upward and its branches down, and the Vedic hymns are its leaves. One who knows this tree is the knower of the Vedas." (Bg 15.1) In Buddhism's Pali canon , the banyan (Pali: nigrodha ) is referenced numerous times. Typical metaphors allude to the banyan's epiphytic nature, likening the banyan's supplanting of a host tree as comparable to the way sensual desire ( kāma ) overcomes humans. Emic and etic In anthropology , folkloristics , linguistics , and

1206-447: Is an anthropological construct . Largely due to such ethnolinguistic and cultural discrepancies, opinions differ on whether animism refers to an ancestral mode of experience common to indigenous peoples around the world or to a full-fledged religion in its own right. The currently accepted definition of animism was only developed in the late 19th century (1871) by Edward Tylor . It is "one of anthropology 's earliest concepts, if not

1273-704: Is considered holy in several religious traditions of India. The Ficus benghalensis is the national tree of India. Vat Purnima is a Hindu festival related to the banyan tree, and is observed by married women in North India and in the Western Indian states of Maharashtra , Goa , Gujarat . For three days of the month of Jyeshtha in the Hindu calendar (which falls in May–June in the Gregorian calendar ) married women observe

1340-437: Is greatly influenced by their cultural norms. Through her studies, Mead found that simple classifications about behaviors and personality could not be used because peoples’ cultures influenced their behaviors in such a radical way. Her studies helped create an emic approach of understanding behaviors and personality. Her research deduced that culture has a significant impact in shaping an individual's personality. Carl Jung ,

1407-477: Is hard to apply certain generalizations of behavior to people who are so diverse and culturally different. One example of this is the F-scale (Macleod). The F-scale , which was created by Theodor Adorno , is used to measure authoritarian personality , which can, in turn, be used to predict prejudiced behaviors. This test, when applied to Americans accurately depicts prejudices towards black individuals. However, when

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1474-484: Is inherently animistic in that it discloses a material field that is animate and self-organizing from the beginning. David Abram used contemporary cognitive and natural science , as well as the perspectival worldviews of diverse indigenous oral cultures, to propose a richly pluralist and story-based cosmology in which matter is alive. He suggested that such a relational ontology is in close accord with humanity's spontaneous perceptual experience by drawing attention to

1541-426: Is necessary for a complete understanding of a culture, while others argue that one approach may be more appropriate depending on the specific research question being addressed. "The emic approach investigates how local people think...". How they perceive and categorize the world, their rules for behavior, what has meaning for them, and how they imagine and explain things. "The etic (scientist-oriented) approach shifts

1608-498: Is sustained only by intensely animistic participation between human beings and their own written signs. For instance, as soon as someone reads letters on a page or screen, they can "see what it says"—the letters speak as much as nature spoke to pre-literate peoples. Reading can usefully be understood as an intensely concentrated form of animism, one that effectively eclipses all of the other, older, more spontaneous forms of animistic participation in which humans were once engaged. To tell

1675-584: The Kerma culture display Animistic elements similar to other Traditional African religions . In contrast, the later polytheistic Napatan and Meroitic periods, with displays of animals in Amulets and the esteemed antiques of Lions, appear to be an Animistic culture rather than a polytheistic culture. The Kermans likely treated Jebel Barkal as a special sacred site, and passed it on to the Kushites and Egyptians who venerated

1742-506: The mesa . In North Africa , the traditional Berber religion includes the traditional polytheistic, animist, and in some rare cases, shamanistic, religions of the Berber people. In the Indian-origin religions , namely Hinduism , Buddhism , Jainism , and Sikhism , the animistic aspects of nature worship and ecological conservation are part of the core belief system. Matsya Purana ,

1809-655: The mother and deduced that all people have mothers and see their mothers in a similar way; they offer nurture and comfort. His studies also suggest that "infants have evolved to suck milk from the breast, it is also the case that all children have inborn tendencies to react in certain ways." This way of looking at the mother is an emic way of applying a concept cross-culturally and universally. Emic and etic approaches are important to understanding personality because problems can arise "when concepts, measures, and methods are carelessly transferred to other cultures in attempts to make cross-cultural generalizations about personality." It

1876-400: The persona (how people choose to present themselves to the world), the anima and animus (part of people experiencing the world in viewing the opposite sex, that guides how they select their romantic partner), and the shadow (dark side of personalities because people have a concept of evil; well-adjusted people must integrate both good and bad parts of themselves). Jung looked at the role of

1943-508: The phenomenology of sensory experience. In his books The Spell of the Sensuous and Becoming Animal, Abram suggests that material things are never entirely passive in our direct perceptual experience, holding rather that perceived things actively "solicit our attention" or "call our focus", coaxing the perceiving body into an ongoing participation with those things. In the absence of intervening technologies, he suggests that sensory experience

2010-409: The social and behavioral sciences , emic ( / ˈ iː m ɪ k / ) and etic ( / ˈ ɛ t ɪ k / ) refer to two kinds of field research done and viewpoints obtained. The "emic" approach is an insider's perspective, which looks at the beliefs , values , and practices of a particular culture from the perspective of the people who live within that culture. This approach aims to understand

2077-440: The "animism" of modernity is characterized by humanity's "professional subcultures", as in the ability to treat the world as a detached entity within a delimited sphere of activity. Human beings continue to create personal relationships with elements of the aforementioned objective world, such as pets, cars, or teddy bears, which are recognized as subjects. As such, these entities are "approached as communicative subjects rather than

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2144-467: The "old animist" definition had been problematic, the term animism was nevertheless "of considerable value as a critical, academic term for a style of religious and cultural relating to the world." The new animism emerged largely from the publications of anthropologist Irving Hallowell , produced on the basis of his ethnographic research among the Ojibwe communities of Canada in the mid-20th century. For

2211-632: The "self". Instead of focusing on the essentialized, modernist self (the "individual"), persons are viewed as bundles of social relationships ("dividuals"), some of which include "superpersons" (i.e. non-humans). Stewart Guthrie expressed criticism of Bird-David's attitude towards animism, believing that it promulgated the view that "the world is in large measure whatever our local imagination makes it." This, he felt, would result in anthropology abandoning "the scientific project." Like Bird-David, Tim Ingold argues that animists do not see themselves as separate from their environment: Hunter-gatherers do not, as

2278-464: The Ojibwe encountered by Hallowell, personhood did not require human-likeness, but rather humans were perceived as being like other persons, who for instance included rock persons and bear persons. For the Ojibwe, these persons were each willful beings, who gained meaning and power through their interactions with others; through respectfully interacting with other persons, they themselves learned to "act as

2345-526: The ancestors, who provide the basis to life. Certain indigenous religious groups such as the Australian Aboriginals are more typically totemic in their worldview, whereas others like the Inuit are more typically animistic. From his studies into child development, Jean Piaget suggested that children were born with an innate animist worldview in which they anthropomorphized inanimate objects and that it

2412-565: The animist perspective in line with Martin Buber 's " I-thou " as opposed to "I-it". In such, Harvey says, the animist takes an I-thou approach to relating to the world, whereby objects and animals are treated as a "thou", rather than as an "it". There is ongoing disagreement (and no general consensus) as to whether animism is merely a singular, broadly encompassing religious belief or a worldview in and of itself, comprising many diverse mythologies found worldwide in many diverse cultures. This also raises

2479-463: The animistic thinking evident in fetishism gave rise to a religion he named totemism . Primitive people believed, he argued, that they were descended from the same species as their totemic animal. Subsequent debate by the "armchair anthropologists" (including J. J. Bachofen , Émile Durkheim , and Sigmund Freud ) remained focused on totemism rather than animism, with few directly challenging Tylor's definition. Anthropologists "have commonly avoided

2546-446: The corporeal, sensuous world that sustains it. Religious studies scholar Graham Harvey defined animism as the belief "that the world is full of persons, only some of whom are human, and that life is always lived in relationship with others." He added that it is therefore "concerned with learning how to be a good person in respectful relationships with other persons." In his Handbook of Contemporary Animism (2013), Harvey identifies

2613-489: The cultural meaning and significance of a particular behavior or practice, as it is understood by the people who engage in it. The "etic" approach, on the other hand, is an outsider's perspective, which looks at a culture from the perspective of an outside observer or researcher. This approach tends to focus on the observable behaviors and practices of a culture, and aims to understand them in terms of their functional or evolutionary significance. The etic approach often involves

2680-430: The culturally specific meaning of specific beliefs and practices; Harris was primarily interested in explaining human behavior. Pike, Harris, and others have argued that cultural "insiders" and "outsiders" are equally capable of producing emic and etic accounts of their culture. Some researchers use "etic" to refer to objective or outsider accounts, and "emic" to refer to subjective or insider accounts. Margaret Mead

2747-462: The exclusion of the other, the complementarity of emic and etic approaches to anthropological research has been widely recognized, especially in the areas of interest concerning the characteristics of human nature as well as the form and function of human social systems. ...Emic knowledge and interpretations are those existing within a culture, that are 'determined by local custom, meaning, and belief' (Ager and Loughry, 2004: n.p.) and best described by

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2814-498: The first." Animism encompasses beliefs that all material phenomena have agency, that there exists no categorical distinction between the spiritual and physical world, and that soul , spirit, or sentience exists not only in humans but also in other animals, plants, rocks, geographic features (such as mountains and rivers), and other entities of the natural environment. Examples include water sprites , vegetation deities , and tree spirits , among others. Animism may further attribute

2881-458: The focus from local observations, categories, explanations, and interpretations to those of the anthropologist. The etic approach realizes that members of a culture often are too involved in what they are doing... to interpret their cultures impartially. When using the etic approach, the ethnographer emphasizes what he or she considers important." Although emics and etics are sometimes regarded as inherently in conflict and one can be preferred to

2948-400: The idea of animism in 1999. Seven comments from other academics were provided in the journal, debating Bird-David's ideas. More recently, postmodern anthropologists are increasingly engaging with the concept of animism. Modernism is characterized by a Cartesian subject-object dualism that divides the subjective from the objective, and culture from nature. In the modernist view, animism is

3015-445: The inert objects perceived by modernists." These approaches aim to avoid the modernist assumption that the environment consists of a physical world distinct from the world of humans, as well as the modernist conception of the person being composed dualistically of a body and a soul. Nurit Bird-David argues that: Positivistic ideas about the meaning of 'nature', 'life', and 'personhood' misdirected these previous attempts to understand

3082-404: The inverse of scientism , and hence, is deemed inherently invalid by some anthropologists. Drawing on the work of Bruno Latour , some anthropologists question modernist assumptions and theorize that all societies continue to "animate" the world around them. In contrast to Tylor's reasoning, however, this "animism" is considered to be more than just a remnant of primitive thought. More specifically,

3149-404: The issue of animism and even the term itself, rather than revisit this prevalent notion in light of their new and rich ethnographies ." According to anthropologist Tim Ingold , animism shares similarities with totemism but differs in its focus on individual spirit beings which help to perpetuate life, whereas totemism more typically holds that there is a primary source, such as the land itself or

3216-437: The local concepts. Classical theoreticians (it is argued) attributed their own modernist ideas of self to 'primitive peoples' while asserting that the 'primitive peoples' read their idea of self into others! She explains that animism is a "relational epistemology " rather than a failure of primitive reasoning. That is, self-identity among animists is based on their relationships with others, rather than any distinctive features of

3283-442: The main differences is that while animists believe everything to be spiritual in nature, they do not necessarily see the spiritual nature of everything in existence as being united ( monism ) the way pantheists do. As a result, animism puts more emphasis on the uniqueness of each individual soul. In pantheism, everything shares the same spiritual essence, rather than having distinct spirits or souls. For example, Giordano Bruno equated

3350-421: The modern religion of spiritualism , which was then prevalent across Western nations. He adopted the term animism from the writings of German scientist Georg Ernst Stahl , who had developed the term animismus in 1708 as a biological theory that souls formed the vital principle , and that the normal phenomena of life and the abnormal phenomena of disease could be traced to spiritual causes. The origin of

3417-643: The mountains and their ecology. Panchavati are the sacred trees in Indic religions, which are sacred groves containing five type of trees, usually chosen from among the Vata ( Ficus benghalensis , Banyan), Ashvattha ( Ficus religiosa , Peepal), Bilva ( Aegle marmelos , Bengal Quince), Amalaki ( Phyllanthus emblica , Indian Gooseberry, Amla), Ashoka ( Saraca asoca , Ashok), Udumbara ( Ficus racemosa , Cluster Fig, Gular), Nimba ( Azadirachta indica , Neem) and Shami ( Prosopis spicigera , Indian Mesquite). The banyan

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3484-406: The old animism have accused it of preserving "colonialist and dualistic worldviews and rhetoric." The idea of animism was developed by anthropologist Sir Edward Tylor through his 1871 book Primitive Culture , in which he defined it as "the general doctrine of souls and other spiritual beings in general." According to Tylor, animism often includes "an idea of pervading life and will in nature;"

3551-402: The original animism of early humanity. The term ["animism"] clearly began as an expression of a nest of insulting approaches to indigenous peoples and the earliest putatively religious humans. It was and sometimes remains, a colonialist slur. — Graham Harvey , 2005. In 1869 (three years after Tylor proposed his definition of animism), Edinburgh lawyer John Ferguson McLennan , argued that

3618-514: The senses, and to the primacy of sensuous terrain, enjoining a more respectful and ethical relation to the more-than-human community of animals, plants, soils, mountains, waters, and weather-patterns that materially sustains humanity. In contrast to a long-standing tendency in the Western social sciences, which commonly provide rational explanations of animistic experience, Abram develops an animistic account of reason itself. He holds that civilised reason

3685-472: The specific linguistic term "phonemic", from phoneme , which is a language-specific way of abstracting speech sounds . When these two approaches are combined, the "richest" view of a culture or society can be understood. On its own, an emic approach would struggle with applying overarching values to a single culture. The etic approach is helpful in enabling researchers to see more than one aspect of one culture, and in applying observations to cultures around

3752-480: The story in this manner—to provide an animistic account of reason, rather than the other way around—is to imply that animism is the wider and more inclusive term and that oral, mimetic modes of experience still underlie, and support, all our literate and technological modes of reflection. When reflection's rootedness in such bodily, participatory modes of experience is entirely unacknowledged or unconscious, reflective reason becomes dysfunctional, unintentionally destroying

3819-411: The study of cultural anthropology. Cultural anthropology states that people are shaped by their cultures and their subcultures, and we must account for this in the study of personality. One way is looking at things through an emic approach. This approach "is culture specific because it focuses on a single culture and it is understood on its own terms." As explained below, the term "emic" originated from

3886-452: The term had also been claimed by religious groups—namely, Indigenous communities and nature worshippers —who felt that it aptly described their own beliefs, and who in some cases actively identified as "animists." It was thus readopted by various scholars, who began using the term in a different way, placing the focus on knowing how to behave toward other beings, some of whom are not human. As religious studies scholar Graham Harvey stated, while

3953-418: The use of standardized measures and frameworks to compare different cultures and may involve the use of concepts and theories from other disciplines, such as psychology or sociology . The emic and etic approaches each have their own strengths and limitations, and each can be useful in understanding different aspects of culture and behavior. Some anthropologists argue that a combination of both approaches

4020-544: The word comes from the Latin word anima , which means life or soul. The first known usage in English appeared in 1819. Earlier anthropological perspectives , which have since been termed the old animism, were concerned with knowledge on what is alive and what factors make something alive. The old animism assumed that animists were individuals who were unable to understand the difference between persons and things . Critics of

4087-413: The world soul with God and espoused a pantheistic animism. In many animistic world views, the human being is often regarded as on a roughly equal footing with other animals, plants, and natural forces. Traditional African religions : most religious traditions of Sub-Saharan Africa are basically a complex form of animism with polytheistic and shamanistic elements and ancestor worship . In East Africa

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4154-402: The world. The terms were coined in 1954 by linguist Kenneth Pike , who argued that the tools developed for describing linguistic behaviors could be adapted to the description of any human social behavior. As Pike noted, social scientists have long debated whether their knowledge is objective or subjective. Pike's innovation was to turn away from an epistemological debate, and turn instead to

4221-455: Was an anthropologist who studied the patterns of adolescence in Samoa. She discovered that the difficulties and the transitions that adolescents faced are culturally influenced. The hormones that are released during puberty can be defined using an etic framework, because adolescents globally have the same hormones being secreted. However, Mead concluded that how adolescents respond to these hormones

4288-498: Was far more sympathetic in regard to "primitive" populations than many of his contemporaries and that Tylor expressed no belief that there was any difference between the intellectual capabilities of "savage" people and Westerners. The idea that there had once been "one universal form of primitive religion" (whether labelled animism , totemism , or shamanism ) has been dismissed as "unsophisticated" and "erroneous" by archaeologist Timothy Insoll , who stated that "it removes complexity,

4355-416: Was fundamentally seen as a mistake, a basic error from which all religions grew. He did not believe that animism was inherently illogical, but he suggested that it arose from early humans' dreams and visions and thus was a rational system. However, it was based on erroneous, unscientific observations about the nature of reality. Stringer notes that his reading of Primitive Culture led him to believe that Tylor

4422-494: Was only later that they grew out of this belief. Conversely, from her ethnographic research, Margaret Mead argued the opposite, believing that children were not born with an animist worldview but that they became acculturated to such beliefs as they were educated by their society. Stewart Guthrie saw animism—or "attribution" as he preferred it—as an evolutionary strategy to aid survival. He argued that both humans and other animal species view inanimate objects as potentially alive as

4489-628: Was ordered by kinship and divided into exogamous descent groups related by a series of marriage exchanges. Their religion was animism, the belief that natural species and objects had souls. With the development of private property, the descent groups were displaced by the emergence of the territorial state. These rituals and beliefs eventually evolved over time into the vast array of "developed" religions. According to Tylor, as society became more scientifically advanced, fewer members of that society would believe in animism. However, any remnant ideologies of souls or spirits, to Tylor, represented "survivals" of

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